The words come out rough. Unpracticed. I haven't said Lev's name since the day I found out he had died.
"It worked. For a long time it worked. I was cold and I was useful and I didn't feel anything, and that was fine. That was safe." I tighten my grip on her hands. "Then you walked down that aisle and smiled at me, and something moved in me for the first time in years, and I was angry at you for it."
Her breath catches. I keep going.
"I was angry because you were soft and you were kind and you didn't break when I pushed. You didn't fold when I was cold.You made my house into a home and you cleaned blood off my face and you told me it was my failure and you were right. About everything."
I pull her hands to my mouth. Press my lips against her knuckles.
"This is not proof," I say against her skin. "This is not for the council. This is not a box. This is ours. Yours and mine. And I swear to you, on my brother's grave, I will protect what's in this room with everything I am. You. This baby. This family. My family."
"Anton." She's crying now. Huge tears streaming down her face, and she's not hiding them.
"The council forced this marriage. But they didn't force this." I press her hand flat against her stomach. Cover it with mine. "I chose this. I'm choosing you. Both of you. Right now."
She breaks.
Not the way she broke in the argument, all fire and fury. She breaks the other way. The soft way. She leans forward and folds into me, her face against my neck, her shoulders shaking, and I catch her. Pull her off the bed and into my lap on the floor and hold her against my chest while she cries.
"I was so scared," she whispers into my throat. "I was so scared you'd look at me and see the council's demand instead of our baby."
"Never." I press my mouth against her hair. "Never, Kira."
She pulls back. Looks at me. Her eyes are swollen and her nose is red and there's mascara smudged under her lashes, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
"I love you," she says.
The words hit me like a detonation. But it’s not the way I expected love to feel, if I ever let myself think about it. It feelslike walking into a house where someone left the lights on for you. It feels like warmth after years of cold.
"Say it again," I tell her.
"I love you, Anton."
I cup her face. Brush the tears off her cheeks with my thumbs. Look into her brown eyes and let her see everything. Every wall down. Every door open. The whole ruined, rebuilt architecture of me, laid bare.
"I love you, too," I say.
It's the first time I've said those words to anyone in my life. They feel foreign. Clumsy. Like a muscle I didn’t know to exercise.
But she hears them. And the sound she makes, a small, shattered breath against my palm, tells me she knows what they cost.
We sit on the floor of our bedroom for a long time. Her in my lap, my arms around her, the pregnancy test lying on the bed above us like a flag planted in new territory.
"We should tell your family," she says eventually.
"Tomorrow."
She stares at me. Then she does something I don't expect.
She smiles.
Not the trained one. Not the practiced one. A real smile, wide and warm and bright, that breaks across her face like dawn.
I press my hand against her stomach. Flat. Warm. Nothing there yet that I can feel.
She twists on my knee, moving to straddle me. My hands automatically move to her hips as she holds my face and kisses me in that way that only she can.
I moan against her mouth and feel her smile against my lips.
